Remembering Is Not Enough traces the emergence of a critical consciousness of the Korean War in American literature and culture over the past seventy-five years. A. J. Yumi Lee provides close readings of key texts from the post-Cold War era that remember and represent the “forgotten” Korean War, including Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Toni Morrison’s Home, Marie Myung-ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters. She argues that rather than simply revisiting a known and settled history, contemporary Korean War literature is actively processing an unresolved conflict that is both past and not past.

Lee shows how literary works have challenged common understandings of the war as an American victory for freedom, from soldiering narratives that address the violence of U.S. imperialism to Korean diasporic novels that depict the surfacing of memory across generations. These examples ask readers to process, analyze, and critique as they remember, and Lee emphasizes that how and why we remember matters as much as what is being recalled.

Reflecting on the Korean War in new and often unexpected ways, Remembering Is Not Enough prompts us to reorient our memories, our storytelling, and our actions toward a more just and peaceful future.

A.J. Yumi Lee is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University and the coeditor of Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy.